Drop City

the moment: “You want to maybe just slip into my tent a minute?”
    The tent was Creamsicle orange, a one-man affair somebody had left in one of the overstuffed closets at Drop City. Pan had taken possession of it when they unloaded the bus because at the moment he didn't need anything more by way of space since he wasn't really sleeping with anybody--plus, it gave him a little privacy and a place to stash his own things. He'd pitched it two hundred yards away from the main cabin, on a sandbar upriver, and no, he wasn't worried about bears, grizzly or otherwise, because he slept with the Springfield rifle he'd shot the deer with back in California and the Winchester Norm's uncle had left behind, not to mention the .44 magnum pistol he kept strapped at his side at all times. Just let a bear poke his head in the tent. Just let him.
    It was warm. Merry's hand was clamped in his. Half the tribe was mewed up in the cabin now, sitting around and picking their toes as people read chapters of _Slaughterhouse Five__ aloud, smoke drifting up and away from the stovepipe and the big pan heating water for the dishes. He and Merry caught a view of them as they drifted by the open door--heads and shoulders, slumped backs, cradled arms, splayed feet--and he saw that Marco was in there. And Star. Of course, that was nothing to him, and he'd already read the book twice--and he'd rather be fishing anyway. Or fucking. Ideally, that is.
    He stole a glance at Merry. Her face was neutral, chin set, eyes squinted against the sun. Her hair swayed with each step, billowing and settling and billowing again. She kept her fingers entwined in his. He saw the dogs, two streaks of liquid fire wrestling over a bone in a spray of sun on the porch, and heard Reba's kids shrieking somewhere downriver while Mendocino Bill and Tom Krishna tried to make sense of the engine that whirred and shuddered but refused to come back to life. Nobody even glanced up as he led Merry along the bank to where the tent stood slack against the ragged line of the trees.
    Inside, it was so close they had to sit yoga-style, their knees touching and their hands gone idle in their laps. But Pan, Pan got right to it, turning from the waist to dig out the pipe, the matches, the tinfoil, the hash and the razor blade, all of it kept close in a plastic baggie in the front pouch of his backpack. Merry said, “I love the sound of the river,” just to make conversation because conversation filled the void when people were preparing drugs for you, and Ronnie said something expected like, “Yeah, it's cool,” and he held the pipe out for her and lit a match. He watched her lips purse as she took in the smoke, watched the light settle in the rings on her fingers. They were in a cocoon, hidden away from the world, the skin of the tent lit up like the lens of a flashlight. Or a sausage. That's what it was. “I feel like we're inside a big orange Italian sausage, the hot kind,” he said, taking a hit and immediately feeding the pipe back to her because she was the one who needed to catch up-- Her eyes watered. They swelled and fractured, and her cheeks distended with the effort to hold in the smoke that was always precious but never more so than out here under the bleached white sky of nowhere. Then she was coughing, hacking till her lungs were blistered and her lips flecked with spittle, and he was coughing too. “It never fails,” she gasped in a faltering little squeak of a voice that could have belonged to Maya, “because I think--it's my theory, anyway--that you get just as high from coughing as from the dope itself.”
    Pan smiled. He agreed. Couldn't have agreed more. He hacked into his fist. After a moment he laid his hands on her thighs and began to work them back and forth with a soft tentative friction. “Music would be cool right now,” he said, just to say something, just to keep it going, and he thought of Lydia, back in the bus, cranking any record she felt like, and then he shook that thought right out of his head. “But you know, in some ways it's just as well that we don't have it, because we've got to _resensitize__ our ears to the environment, like the moose, the caribou, the wolves--you hear the _wolves__ last night?”
    Her eyes were closed. She murmured something--yes, no, maybe--and then her eyes flashed open and she laid her hands atop his and guided them up her thighs. For a long moment they both looked down at their two pairs of hands working there